A Day of Fate

A newspaper editor, worn out, goes to the country to rest and stays with a Quaker family — and a day, a meeting-house and a woman change the direction of his life. Roe was a Presbyterian minister and a cavalry chaplain in the Civil War who turned novelist after the Chicago fire and became one of the best-selling American writers of his day; the Quaker silence in this one is done with real respect. Fifty-three plates from Eastman Johnson and Edvard Munch trace the quiet rhythms of home, work and return that shape this story of a life turned around.